A LIVéL Y ANGéR ALL at once, the cocktail party was .r-l.. over. One minute, the room had been so full of people that the visiting young girl, Mary, the stranger, had been afraid to move about for fear of bumping someone, and the next minute, as fast as water rushing down the drain of a sink, everyone had gone, out of the room, through the hall, and out the door of the small house, leaving only Mrs. Eustis, whose pretty room this was, and Mary, in her new suède pumps, and, like a massive bit of flotsam stranded on the furry white sofa, the guest with the beard. Mary had been aware of this beard ever since five 0' clock and had concluded, from its color and luxuriance, that the owner must be foreign-like herself, a visitor in the university town. A visiting pro- fessor, perhaps. Everyone she had met that afternoon had connections in one way or another with the university, but they had all been quite usual-looking people. She was doomed to disillusion, for he wasn't foreign. Mrs. Eustis, roaming slowly about the room gather- ing ashtrays, said over her shoulder, "Pudgy, that lovely beard. I haven't had a minute to ask you. Where did you get that lovely beard? " The big, fat man fluttered his hands O d . " M o d d " h SI eWIse. 1 summer ma ness, e saId and shot his neck forward and back , in its collar, in a henlike gesture, and settled against the pillows. Mary could see he really loved his beard. "I thought you were probably French," she said shyly. Mr. Footewaite brought his two eyes around to focus on the young girl, seated so alert, feet close together, hold- ing wIth the carefulness of Inexperience her still almost full glass of sherry. "Now, who is this beautiful young creature?" he asked, as if Mary had only just then materialized out of noth- ing, out of the air. Mrs. Eustis, an empty glass in each hand, gave a brief laugh at Mary's art- lessness and said, "Oh, not French, Mary. What a pity, isn't it! Only Pas- o I b 1 . " salC, e Ieve. Mr. Footewaite chose to ignore this. "Tell me," he insisted. "So young, so bl . " oomlng. Even if he wasn't foreign, he had what the girl supposed were foreign ways. She opened her mouth to explain, in detail, that she was visiting for the night; she was on her way back to board- ing school after a weekend at home. But Mrs. EustIs spoke first and explained, though not fully enough to suit Mary, who added, for complete clarification, in her sweet, young-girl voice, "You see, Mummy and Mrs. Eustis roomed together in college, ages ago." "Ages-yes," Mrs. EustIs echoed without smiling, sounding sad or vexed, as though she wondered if someone or something had been putting something over on her. "Oh, come, not ages." Mr. Foote- waite's words, languidly gallant, emerged from the big aperture above the coarse red-brown beard. "Couldn't be." Casually he looked up and down the tall, thin woman in limp printed chiffon, and Mary regarded her, too, with a more searching gaze, puzzled; Mrs. Eustis did look so much older than her mother, but she couldn't be, could she, since they had roomed together and been simultaneously in love with Rupert Brooke? lVlaybe divorce was aging. Her mother had warned her that there would be no Mr Eustis; after a divorce, Mr. Eustis had transferred himself to some California university-Mary's mother couldn't remember which. Or perhaps It was living in this university town, being required to talk to profes- sors at every dinner party and, presuma- bly, often staying up late discussing very important things, that had given Mrs. Eustis that tired, disenchanted look around the mouth and eyes. Mr. Foote- waite asked Mary where she was at school, drank, and murmured, "Charm- ing, charming," though what was so charming about school, if that was what he meant, she would have been hard put to It to say. She took a sip of sherry Ugly gym suits and hard, repellent, lJ'1t , · ! , r{R. - ) \ If)q I; . :I < YJr. f.r)J) ! ::, "\. t; / ) , ." .0:: HMIiIl , ., \ , , ï 7 , ,, : :!! J ': 't " 'r'7) L ) . '- '- Ji)-- " ': I 'w '&. '^ ,... L f . } lÄ '? ":' 49 cold basketballs, and math, which everyone hated, naturally! And worst of all was seeing boys so seldom, even now, when she was a senior, that every vacation she went home terrified she might have forgotten how to talk to them. "Ah; we fade," Mr. F ootewaite said, his voice indifferent, but indifferent to her or his own remark was what Mary couldn't be sure of. By now, Mrs. Eus- tis, tall and tired in the tired patterned chiffon, had gathered up a large colony of ashtrays with ashes and olive pits in them, and wet, used glasses, and the sherry decanter into a manageable col- ony on a low glass table. Probably soon she would go into the kitchen for a tray and gather them all up again, :Mary thought; maybe she would call to little Paul, who was having his supper out there, to bring her a tray . Whichever, wasn't she kind of rude, wIth him still sitting here? But Mr. Footewaite didn't L seem to mind. He appeared to be estab- lished for an indefinite stay on the white sofa. He had a big head, a wide, untidy beard, a big, shapeless mouth, and berrylike brown eyes, which lighted when he moved his glass forward and, suddenly smiling, asked, "Is there a little more of the wine?" Mrs. Eustis set the decanter before him. Mary's mother had said to her, "We were closer than sisters once, and I feel sorry I never see her now. I don t know, though. Then we were both crazy about Rupert Brooke- oh, and Walter Pater. 'A diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her' -that kind of thing, you know . We used to memorize pages and pages and ask each other 'Where does this come from?' after lights, in bed. Oh, we were very fierce about it. I can just see us lying hissing at each other in the dark." Little Paul Eustis, a crop-haired crea- ture in a red, green, and white striped cotton jersey, appeared beside the knob of the door to the narrow hall. "Run back to the kitchen and finish your sup- per," his mother said without looking at him, as she had been saying to him ever since her party started, and, as he had done each time, Paul nodded once quickly and ran away, back down the hall. He was an awfully neat little boy, Mary thought, to be an inhabitant of this subtly dusty house with its air of floating dIsorder; things could become lost in this house easily, even though it was so small, and most of the domestic treasures, ornaments and so on, were chipped and awry; lovely things they had been once, all of them. "Can I help?" Mary said In to the